Related papers: Phenotypic Heterogeneity in Mycobacterial Stringen…
The arabinose utilization system of E. coli displays a stochastic "all or nothing" response at intermediate levels of arabinose, where the population divides into a fraction catabolizing the sugar at a high rate (ON state) and a fraction…
Recent studies at individual cell resolution have revealed phenotypic heterogeneity in nominally clonal tumor cell populations. The heterogeneity affects cell growth behaviors, which can result in departure from the idealized uniform…
Multiple phenotypic states often arise in a single cell with different gene-expression states that undergo transcription regulation with positive feedback. Recent experiments have shown that at least in E. coli, the gene state switching can…
Genetic robustness, the preservation of an optimal phenotype in the face of mutations, is critical to the understanding of evolution as phenotypically expressed genetic variation is the fuel of natural selection. The origin of genetic…
Phenotype variations define heterogeneity of biological and molecular systems, which play a crucial role in several mechanisms. Heterogeneity has been demonstrated in tumor cells. Here, samples from blood of patients affected from colon…
Cell size is a fundamental determinant of cellular physiology, influencing processes such as growth, division, and function. In this study, we develop a segmented mathematical framework to investigate how different control mechanisms…
Gene regulatory networks, i.e. DNA segments in a cell which interact with each other indirectly through their RNA and protein products, lie at the heart of many important intracellular signal transduction processes. In this paper we analyse…
In this paper, we use the framework of infinitesimal homeostasis to study general design principles for the occurrence of homeostasis in gene regulatory networks. We assume that the dynamics of the genes explicitly includes both…
In biology phenotypic switching is a common bet-hedging strategy in the face of uncertain environmental conditions. Existing mathematical models often focus on periodically changing environments to determine the optimal phenotypic response.…
We consider a multi-species reaction-diffusion system that arises in epidemiology to describe the spread of several strains, or variants, of a disease in a population. Our model is a natural spatial, multi-species, extension of the…
Recently, a large number of studies have been carried out on the early signatures of sudden regime shifts in systems as diverse as ecosystems, financial markets, population biology and complex diseases. Signatures of regime shifts in gene…
Experimental and empirical observations on cell metabolism cannot be understood as a whole without their integration into a consistent systematic framework. However, the characterization of metabolic flux phenotypes is typically reduced to…
In biopharmaceutical manufacturing, fermentation processes play a critical role in productivity and profit. A fermentation process uses living cells with complex biological mechanisms, leading to high variability in the process outputs,…
Characterization of pluripotent states, in which cells can both self-renew and differentiate, and the irreversible loss of pluripotency are important research areas in developmental biology. In particular, an understanding of these…
In many longitudinal microarray studies, the gene expression levels in a random sample are observed repeatedly over time under two or more conditions. The resulting time courses are generally very short, high-dimensional, and may have…
Bacteria and their bacteriophages are the most abundant, widespread and diverse groups of biological entities on the planet. In an attempt to understand how the interactions between bacteria, virulent phages and temperate phages might…
Stochastic gene expression has been implicated in a variety of cellular processes, including cell differentiation and disease. In this issue of Cell, Weinberger et al. (2005) take an integrated computational-experimental approach to study…
A toggle switch consists of two genes that mutually repress each other. This regulatory motif is active during cell differentiation and is thought to act as a memory device, being able to choose and maintain cell fate decisions. In this…
A stochastic reaction-diffusion model is studied on a networked support. In each patch of the network two species are assumed to interact following a non-normal reaction scheme. When the interaction unit is replicated on a directed linear…
The existence of phenotypic heterogeneity in single-species bacterial biofilms is well-established in the published literature. However, the modeling of population dynamics in biofilms from the viewpoint of social interactions, i.e.…